France Ending Minitel Service 137
New submitter pays-vert writes "On Saturday, France will turn off the Minitel service. A forerunner of the world wide web, Minitel provided news, online banking and, yes, porn via a chic plug'n'play terminal. The service remained massively popular for a while even after the rise of the Internet, but ultimately has lost out to technological innovation. 'About 400,000 of the machines are still in use across the country, but perhaps most affected will be Brittany, where the devices were developed, and where many farmers still depend on them. ... Internet service spread much more slowly in France than it did elsewhere in Europe or in the United States, largely because of the popularity of the Minitel, historians say. Only around the turn of the century did the Internet come to much of this soggy western region, an expanse of green that bulges out into the Atlantic Ocean. The Minitel was hugely useful to farmers. Realizing that the devices could save time and money, local agricultural organizations developed programs for farmers to, say, track pork prices, inform the authorities of animal births and deaths, or consult the results of chemical tests on milk.'"
The dead past (Score:5, Interesting)
Internet service spread much more slowly in France than it did elsewhere in Europe or in the United States, largely because of the popularity of the Minitel, historians say
Now we consult historians to find out about the spread of the internet? That makes me feel old :(
Re:[...], historians say (Score:4, Interesting)
What? You want a whale biologist?
The one thing that Minitel had (Score:5, Interesting)
was easy billing of services: depending on a service's call number, several billing levels were available (from free to more than $10/min), and the user was aware of how much each number cost. That's the micropayment thingy the Internet never got right. I remember having to beg to Minitel guys to subsidize me when I was doing Web stuff for a TV station ^^
Re:Going down kicking and screaming (Score:5, Interesting)
The fact that it was working just fine and the population liked and used it will be ignored for the brief moment that your comment is read.
In that case, the fact that it was a horribly ugly and slow even compared to 56k Internet (compare it to an old black-and-white teletext) should also be ignored. I forgot to mention the outrageous charges, even to connect to public administration services; I remember myself waiting for some nation-wide exam results to display, the connection timer was the real source of stress, not the results!
Re:MiniTel was a Come-Lately, too late, too little (Score:5, Interesting)
I believe you where not around in 82, or didn't go to france in the 80s.
What France Telecom invented (probably by accident) is that under some circumstances you can "let go".
So they acctually accepted that other companies would make money on their network, they provided the terminal, the infrastructure and the billing but allmost all the rest where in the hand of a lot of various private company.
When the first "book shop on the internet" came out in the early 90s there where about 40 000 Minitel services and at least 5 active book shops.
Re:The dead past (Score:5, Interesting)
It's completely misleading. The Minitel was popular because there was no Internet. Then the internet was available, and it was not successful because you had to pay every minute of connection to France Telecom (monopoly, high prices) on top of the fee given to your provider.
When I heard that local communications were free in the US, I couldn't believe it. It was really expensive in France up to the years 2000.
flag whole article flame bait (Score:3, Interesting)
Seriously? Farmers depend on Minitel? I never saw that in my "soggy wester region", Normandy. Also, care to give citations for what I bolded out? Hell in the US there are still vast portions of the country very, very badly covered by high speed internet access or not at all which isn't true in France. Who are these "historians"?
Was this article written by a Texan rancher who still strikes out "French fries" on restaurant menus to write "Liberty fries"?
Minitel created the french ISPs of today (Score:5, Interesting)
One forgotten thing in these comments (or did I skip?) is, in an era just without internet, spending lots of time on semiporn chatting on Minitels appears to have raised so much money than it turned these service owners into billionnaires.
The current owner of Free, which is I believe the largest french ISP after the ex-state monopoly France telecom, started as a minitel porn service supplier. Then he just used his millions to switch to ISP.
Many french themselves have forgotten this, and here Free has quite a good aura today...
So, while I seriously doubt Minitel service was costing much to the state, it definitely raised huge amounts of silly guys' money into sex chat providers pockets.
These, are our present internet landlords here.
And there are people around that still think theyr work will better the country.
Re:Yes, obviously Minitel was a monopolistic mista (Score:2, Interesting)
Unless those BBS's were willing to provide their users with a terminal or computer for FREE to access their systems then your argument doesn't have a leg to stand on. The percent of the population of france in the late 70s who had a computer barely registered.
It was deployed in the US, too. (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not well known, but Minitel, the French system, was deployed in the US. Local dial-up ports were available in most US cities. The system was run by Telecom France, and gave access to both lightly used US services and the full network in France. I used to have an account on it. There was no extra charge for communicating across the Atlantic, so the service was useful to anyone who had people to talk to in France.
Minitel had a delightful culture in some ways. People wrote poetry on the dating services.
Re:The dead past (Score:2, Interesting)
Wasn't the "internet" mostly developed by government funded institutions (military, research institutions....)? Makes me wonder....